Three formats are commonly offered to leaders considering psychedelic-assisted work, and they are not variations of one product — they differ in screening, duration, supervision and what happens afterwards.
A retreat sells an experience. Executive coaching sells a thinking partner. A clinical program builds medical screening, preparation and months of integration around the experience. Each is legitimate. They are not interchangeable, and the failure mode of choosing wrongly is different in each case.
We run the third. This page is written so you can tell them apart, including where our format is the wrong choice.
Three things: whether a psychiatrist screens you before you are accepted, how long the structure lasts after the session, and whether the people in the room are clinically qualified. Duration is the most visible difference — retreat formats typically run five to eight days end to end, while clinical programs run for months.
Often, yes. The distinguishing question is what integration concretely consists of: how many sessions, with whom, over what period, and whether they are scheduled before you arrive or offered afterwards. Published clinical guidance treats structured preparation and follow-up as part of the intervention itself, not as an optional extra.
Yes. If you have done this work before, you are medically uncomplicated, you know what you are looking for, and you want a contained experience rather than a six-month process, a well-run retreat may be exactly right — and considerably less demanding of your time.
Typical duration
Medical screening
Who is present
Group or individual
Preparation before
Integration after
Psychedelic component
Best when
Fails when
The retreat’s failure mode is the return.
The week is often genuinely powerful. The difficulty comes four to eight weeks later, when the person is back inside the same schedule, the same company and the same relationships, and the clarity has faded. Nothing structural changed, so nothing structural held. Some of the people who come to us have already tried a retreat and describe exactly this.
Coaching’s failure mode is the ceiling.
Executive coaching is effective at what it is for. It is not designed to reach unresolved trauma, nervous-system dysregulation or the physiological side of burnout. When those are the actual constraint, better thinking does not move them.
The clinical program’s failure mode is you.
Six months of scheduled work is a real imposition on a leader’s calendar. If the time is not genuinely available, the program underperforms — and reasonably, the client concludes it did not work. This is why we decline people who cannot give it the attention.
For comparability, the same fields as the table above, filled in:
Duration:
six months, four phases
Screening:
psychiatric interview plus medical review — bloodwork, cardiovascular and renal markers, blood pressure, history and medications — before acceptance
Diagnostics:
DNA, gut health, hormones, metabolic markers, biological age, and brain imaging (SPECT), before and after
Residentials:
three, seven days each, at a private site in Jamaica, one client at a time
Sessions:
two clinically supervised psychedelic-assisted sessions per residential, two professional facilitators and medical oversight present
Core team:
a personal psychiatrist or psychologist, a personal health expert, a personal Conscious Leadership coach — roughly 50 to 60 one-to-one sessions online plus 21 days on site with each
Also on site:
staff of seven, plus a breathwork expert, a massage therapist, and a yoga and meditation teacher
Integration:
weekly psychotherapy and health calls and bi-weekly coaching between and after every residential
Protocol:
none standardised. Every program is designed after screening.
“The substance isn’t the therapy. It’s the catalyst.”
Hardi Põder, co-founder
If you want an experience, a retreat will give you one, faster and with less commitment. If you want a thinking partner, coaching is the cleaner instrument. If the thing you actually want is for something to change and stay changed, the structure around the experience is what does that — and structure takes months, not days.